the unlight bearableness of translating a really great title

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The Translator’s Answerability

My previous post on Masha Gessen’s review of the two new Anna Karenina translations, one each by Rosamund Bartlett and Marian Schwartz, attracted some criticisms. I’ll respond in a couple of posts to make each one shorter.

John Cowan comments, “You write as if the translator had no responsibility to the author at all, and it is all one whether the AK translator writes ‘All happy families are alike’ on the first page, or ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'”

I hope this wasn’t a widespread impression from my piece. But maybe I wasn’t clear enough. A glance at the Weinberger essay I quote from should dispel any lingering doubts, especially where he writes: “Now obviously a translation that is replete with semantical errors is probably a bad translation.” Outside of parodying or otherwise hijacking a text for other purposes, it’s hard to imagine a context where switching a Tolstoy line for a Dickens line would be seen as a successful translation strategy.

But why the “probably” in Weinberger’s quote? Because “fidelity may be the most overrated of a translation’s qualities.” It is the easiest thing to get right. Not easy of course, just the easiest.

His amplifying example: “I once witnessed an interesting experiment: average 9-year-old students at a public school in Rochester, New York, were given a text by Rimbaud and a bilingual dictionary, and asked to translate the poem. Neither they nor their teacher knew a word of French. What they produced were not masterpieces, but they were generally as accurate as, and occasionally wittier than, any of the existing scholarly versions. In short, up to a point, anyone can translate anything faithfully. But the point at which they cannot translate is the point where real translations begin to be made. […] A translation is a whole work; it is not a series of matching en face lines and shouldn’t be read as such. It means that the primary task of a translator is not merely to get the dictionary meanings right — which is the easiest part — but rather to invent a new music for the text in the translation-language, one that is mandated by the original.”

He uses poetry as his primary example, but the same is true of artistic prose. Translations are whole works, not series of matching lexical or semantic items, which means that the primary task of most translators is not merely getting the dictionary meanings right (the easiest part) but inventing new music for their works that resonates in the receiving culture’s language and literary traditions. Without that, it doesn’t matter how “accurate” their renderings are, for no one will want to read them. Responsibility to the author is implicit in this, but responsibility to the text is foremost. As Samuel Johnson once put it when asked by a reader regarding his intentions in a particular passage of Rasselas, “Madam, when I wrote that, only two beings in the universe knew what was in my head, God and myself. And now, Madam, God only knows what I was thinking when I wrote that.”

Responsibility to an author can become explicit, too, however. It was part of the Maudes’ motivation for translating Tolstoy — they had met the man and were long-time friends and admirers. Something like this has happened to me two or three times, and I’ve written about two such instances in “A Matter of Trust,” part of a forum on “Translation and Social Commitment,” published by 91st Meridian.

In such cases, the author’s encouragement can increase one’s motivation to do things well, and interest in the literary qualities of a text comes to seem a rather empty and abstract substitute for the respect and affection one feels for the person. I suppose this is the “simpatico” method that Lawrence Venuti critiques in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. He is probably right that, as a method, it fails for some kinds of literature, as his example of experimental Modernist poetry makes clear. But it is also a mode of work that can be powerful and productive for many translators, an additional source of responsibility often overlooked in discussing their work.